[stavros]

Hey Alex! Yes, exactly, I get that they're a fairly different category with different tradeoffs (trustless server), but also I own the server so I don't need it to be trustless. If it worked well, the tradeoff would be smaller, but as it stands it's not worth it for me over Immich.

[0x6c6f6c]

Comparing self-hosted immich and a truly E2EE hosted platform like Ente is really odd. There are massively different trade-offs and target customers between these.

Ente is a private hosted photo storage and sharing platform. Only trusted devices that can decrypt /encrypt would even be able to perform the kind of work to tag photos for face recognition, and in this category I'm not aware of any hosted alyermative that actually does this, and they do a _pretty good job_ considering the limitations of E2EE.

Immich, Google Photos, Apple Photos- these platforms don't have to work around the fact all user data is opaque ciphertext. I imagine you could extend the capabilities of machine learning to a trusted node (similar to what you can do with Ente Desktop, but with more capable models), but they still have to work around any of that metadata being visible to them as well.

This takes somewhat trivial problems and makes them entirely non-trivial to solve. Self hosted platforms that don't provide an E2EE story have significantly less headache to deal with, especially since most people justify it by "it's running on my server so it's okay". And I get that, you can generally work around this issue with disk-level encryption and you're all good. It's just not the same product at all.

[stavros]

I agree it's not. It's just that, for someone who doesn't need the trustless architecture, it doesn't make sense to go with Ente right now, because it doesn't work as well. I could overlook the missing features if the ones that are there worked, but face recognition just got stuck for me and never finished.

[cdman]

Here is my use-case for a trustless architecture: there are parts of my families digital life which I would prefer to continue working as much as possible, even if I'm temporarily or permanently unavailable. "Pay this amount of money monthly/yearly for this to keep working" is a straight forward concept for 99.999% of the population. "Poke around in docker debugging logs if this stuff stuff" is not.

And, if stuff has to be hosted by third parties for me, I prefer it to be encrypted.

[Grombobulous]

Have you tried contacting support?

I’ve never had any issue with facial recognition. Maybe this is a rare issue that’s an easy fix.

[ignoramous]

> I don't need it to be trustless. If it worked well, the tradeoff would be smaller...

You mean, on a self-hosted Ente (or Immich), a off-device/server-side, capable multimodal LLM, like Gemma4 12b would do?